Resurrection Man is about violence - its irrationality and its glamour. The picture is set in 1975 Belfast, and though the fashions and the music are grimly familiar, the city is not. In keeping with the stylised tone of the novel by Eoin McNamee, who also wrote the screenplay, this is Belfast re-imagined in the style of a penny dreadful. An eerie mist rolls through the streets in daylight, enveloping street corner preachers and gossipy mums with creaky prams; at night, the city comes alive with sordid eruptions of colour. A banana yellow Ford Escort caught under glaring street lights and the jet of blood from a punctured artery carry the same garish shock.

Until now, the only hat definitely in the ring for Mayor of London has been Jeffrey Archer's shiny topper. His campaign team is already chasing about glad-handing anyone in sight. The rest of the possible party candidates are more circumspect - won't say yes and won't say no. But putative Tory rivals include Chris Patten, Steven Norris, Alan Clarke, David Mellor. On the Labour side candidates may be Ken Livingstone, Glenda Jackson, Margaret Hodge, Tony Banks, and The Independent's own Trevor Phillips. Then there are a few non-party names - Fred Housego, Richard Branson and Peter Stringfellow.

From vicious thug in `Scum' to vicious wife-beater in `Ladybird, Ladybird' to vicious crook in `Face' - Ray Winstone is the hard man of British cinema. His latest film, `Nil by Mouth', casts him true to form but, he tells Ryan Gilbey, he's dying to play a nice guy

One annual French film festival entirely devoted to British cinema would be a curiosity; to stage two is a welcome aberration. Dinard and Cherbourg, just 150 kilometres apart along the north coast of France, both hold Britfests each autumn. Cherbourg has been around for longer, but Dinard (at least the locals claim) is the bigger deal. Whatever the case, during the long slump from which our cinema is gingerly emerging, the organisers must have often wondered if there were enough new films to go around.

Twenty bands and artists may have worked their hides off to get the Bosnian aid album Help! completed in 24 hours, and the album may have sold 71,000 copies in a day, dwarfing the entire week's sales of every other album in the charts, but you won't see it at number one. Chart regulator CIN maintains that Help! counts as a compilation and is therefore ineligible for entry in the main album charts. Some voices have even suggested that Parlophone was responsible for bringing the matter to CIN's attention (the label released Blur's new album two days after Help!). The real winners, though, are the Levellers. Thanks to Help's exclusion, they've got a number one album. A bit odd, seeing as how everyone hates them. Still, nice to see the under-talented, as well as the under-privileged, profiting from such a noble project.

ON that sunlit day in July 1966, the one we all remember so well, I was sitting with Alan Clarke, my fellow radio commentator, with one of those large, old-fashioned lip microphones wrapped around our faces.

'A BIT of a lad' is what I'd been told to expect, and at first sight Tim Roth doesn't seem likely to disappoint. The playground swagger, the jeans and biker boots, the bottled lager he pours - it looks like a calculated affront to the commodious splendour of his Savoy Hotel suite. They won't let you in the bar in jeans, but who cares when room service can bring the bar to you? As it turns out, Roth is relaxed, articulate and friendly, his only concession to laddishness this afternoon is a loud belch, and that at least keeps the photographer amused.